No Rest for the Wicked

Part 1: Unmade

Chapter Two

The next few days are bad. I should have known I would screw things up for him. I should have just pretended to fall sound asleep and stayed that way until they put me back where I belong.

It starts with Tracy making excuses for not coming to the phone. On Sunday afternoon she agrees to talk, but it’s mostly just yeses and nos. He starts to get irritated. "What about the time you got fried and started flirting with Steve Woodcock? Did I treat you like some kind of depraved freak?"

She says, "I wasn’t flirting with him. And you weren’t drunk on Friday."

Monday at school is worse. Most of his friends treat him the same as ever, but there are little knots of people that all fall silent when he walks by. When he’s three steps past them they start whispering, and he catches words here and there.

Owen’s absent. But by the end of track practice somebody has spilled the beans. It seems that Owen called a friend on Saturday and announced that Connor Beckford and Violet Klemmer had "attacked" him. It was a "set-up." Violet lured Owen up the hill in order to park, and Beckford just popped out of the bushes. Owen was three sheets to the wind and defenseless as a baby. He doesn’t honestly know why they did it, but he suspects that Connor is a closet psycho who’s got some kind of twisted pact going with the Goth girl. "Like Christian Slater and that chick in that old 80’s movie. They’re trying to beat down all the straight arrows in the school." He reminds people of the incident with the bully and the concussion. "He may look like a pussy, but man when he comes at you, he’s got these serious psycho eyes. Like he could slit your throat and not give a fuck."

"Crude, but not inaccurate," says Holtz.

"It wasn’t him," I say.

The funny thing is that none of it surprises Connor. Or none of it but the part about Violet, because he barely knows her by sight. The beating part though, he can almost sort of remember. It seems to him that he was the one who was wasted that night. He was walking a long way in the dark. Then Owen was there, and Owen was a bad person he didn’t like and it turned into a kick-ass video game. There was a little blonde girl there too and she was kicking his ass, which just makes it more like a dream. But he has a purple triangular smudge on his ribs, and even though it doesn’t hurt to touch and it’s almost faded now, it seems pretty real.

"So much for innocence," says Holtz. "You’re making him into you."

I don’t bother to argue. I ask, "What do you think I should do if they make me be him again?"

"You seek my paternal advice?"

I pretend not to hear the sarcasm. "Yeah. Yeah, I do."

He shrugs bodilessly. "Kill yourself."

I stare through my darkness at Connor. He’s turning his car into the driveway and stopping at the mailbox, whistling along to something on the radio. I don’t know the song, but he obviously likes it. As he gets out of the car, he turns for a few seconds to look at the cloud snagged right on the crest of a craggy purple ridge. He thinks it looks very Middle Earth, whatever that means. He thinks the letters will come this week. He seems pretty all right, considering.

* * *

It’s Violet who isn’t. On Wednesday she finds him.

He doesn’t like to eat in the cafeteria anymore, and today he feels like being by himself. Not because of the rumors flying around, but just because. So he sneaks into one of the chorus practice rooms off the main hallway. He flips through a book of sheet music someone’s left on a chair. He picks out the first bars of the Star Wars theme on the piano, and then he straddles the bench and takes out his sandwich with turkey and cheese, no tomatoes. He eats with his Latin book open in front of him. Violet enters just as Dido is preparing to stab herself.

She stands with her back against the door. "Kim Pfister told me you were in here."

Connor closes the book and stands up holding it against him. He’s staring, and a glance at Violet makes it pretty clear why.

She looks like she hasn’t slept since Friday. There are deep violet half-circles under her eyes, and her translucent skin is breaking out in all kinds of places. Her T-shirt is rumpled with sweat-stains under both arms, and her bare legs are covered with thin scratches as if she’s been running through the woods. The bruises on the upper arm and jaw that I gave her barely show. But something’s happened to her hands, because they’re crisscrossed in white from palm to wrist. Looking a little closer, I can see it’s a patchwork of Johnson’s gauze and tape she’s put on herself.

She sees him looking and holds them up. "I kind of had a fight with a window. It broke."

She scares him. He’s seen kids stressed-out and depressed, but never anyone who seemed so matter-of-fact about it. He can’t read anything in her eyes to tell him what she wants.

She takes a step closer, still holding her hands out. "Have you always had it?"

"What?" He blushes a little.

"The superpowers thing."

He shakes his head.

"Don’t pretend," says Violet. She sounds very tired. She takes a step closer.

The next instant her leg is arcing through the air, the toe of the tennis shoe heading straight for his Adam’s apple, and I want to yell at him to twist and parry. Amazingly, he does it anyway.

"See what I mean," says Holtz. "He’s learning."

Violet hops to the side and gets her balance back, her face drawn with pain. She draws her hands in to her sides protectively. "See?"

"See what? You just tried to kick me in the throat." He frowns and rubs his arm, wondering where she learned to do the Crouching Tiger move. But mainly he feels sorry for her. He says, "Y’know, if you really want I can try to talk to Owen."

"Talk to him?" Her dead-white face looks scornful for an instant, the smudgy eyes narrowing, and then it just looks white and pointy and blank again. "It’s too late for that. He never liked me."

He nods, reluctant to admit it but at the same time relieved that she knows the truth. He doesn’t like lying for people. He says, "Look, whatever I did on Friday night… well, I was totally wasted. I can’t believe I hit either of you. I guess it was because I knew Owen was gonna screw you over. I’m not usually a violent pers–"

"You weren’t wasted." She’s got him pinned with her little black eyes now, like a bug on a card. "Is that why you think you were so strong?"

"Me? Strong?" He laughs nervously and holds out both hands as if to say what you see is what you get. "It was the whole whisky courage thing. Owen–well, basically he fell down. I think I might have helped. Then I kinda immobilized you, and you may be taking karate lessons but you’re still no Sydney Bristow. I feel like a total bas–"

"That’s what I thought first," Violet interrupts. She folds her arms over her chest and keeps staring at him. He shuts his mouth. "I thought my perspective was whack. I thought Owen was too wasted to fight, and I thought you seemed hella strong to me just ‘cause I was the frail flower and all. Then I remembered that it started out pretty even."

She breaks the deadlock and moves her eyes to a spot just over his shoulder. He doesn’t budge his. "So I went home and tried some things. My dad has this rack of golf clubs he bought a separate insurance policy on. Some of them are like, collector’s items he got on ebay, and they’re all really fucking heavy. Like, so heavy that the most I could carry at a time is two. Anyway, so I picked up the whole rack under my arm and carried them outside and dropped them in the crappy little ornamental lake. I didn’t break a sweat."

Without meaning to, he takes a step backward. "Maybe it was adrenaline."

She ignores him; she hardly seems to see him now, reliving the events in her head. "He was kinda pissed. So was my mom. She was gonna take me for this emergency therapy session. So I told her that this wasn’t about me flipping out over a boy, this was about me being a superhero. I told her she should be glad I was finally showing ‘excellence’ at something, and I took one of her stupid ten-pound freeweights and knocked a big old hole in the wall."

"And maybe a hole in dear mother’s head too," says Holtz.

It’s exactly what I’m thinking. I don’t know if Connor is too, because it’s getting harder for me to concentrate. Even from here I can feel Violet’s anger, like the fizzing and spitting of cut electrical wires. I feel how hard it must have been, what self-control it must have taken for her to put her fists through the window-pane instead of through someone’s face. I’m not sure she didn’t sample some of the first option before she stopped herself.

"Lovely companion for him, really," says Holtz. "Too bad he doesn’t seem exactly taken with her."

I count to ten and make myself look.

He’s right. The bell has just rung. Connor is trying to edge his way out of the room, his face flushed with what I know is fear and disgust. He wants to help Violet, he knows he should help her–his mom and the cheesy suicide-prevention posters and people on TV would say so. But he doesn’t understand why she’s freaking this way. He’s never seen anything like it before.

Her face is whiter and the edges of her eyes are deep red. She doesn’t actually stand in his way, but she plucks at his sleeve as he comes close, his eyes averted.

"What does it mean, Connor? What’s it for? I know you have it too. I saw you just tap Owen and put him on the mat, and he’d only had a couple beers, whatever he says. I know what you did to Marc Wolf in ninth grade, and he was twice your size. Does it have something to do with it?"

"With what?" He’s got the door open now; he’s almost out in the whooping, clomping, bellowing chaos of the hallway, and he’s never been so glad to be there.

"With… you know." Her face turns red. "Owen and me, we… I know it doesn’t make sense, but it was right afterwards that I changed, so I thought maybe it had something to do with that. Like I was coming into my powers, and it was partly ‘cause when I did it for the first time I loved him. But now he won’t talk to me. He says I hit him, when I know the truth is I hit you. Can you tell everybody? Can you tell them you hit him and I only defended him?"

She’s babbling now, trying to get it all out before Connor bolts. He shakes his head confusedly–and, without thinking, uses the name she had before she started calling herself Violet. "It’s OK, Amanda. Owen’s an asshole. Just chill out and stay away from him."

"My name’s not Amanda." At some point tears must have leaked out of her eyes, but now they seem frozen on her face. Her jaw doesn’t even tighten. She says in a dead voice, "You called me some other name before. What was it?"

"I don’t know."

A blond girl coming in for choir practice bumps into Connor from behind, and he turns to her and smiles. "Sorry. I’m a walking hazard zone."

The girl smiles back. Her eyes drift to Violet, and she stops smiling.

"You called me slayer, didn’t you? What’s it mean?"

"I don’t know. I don’t remember. Violet." He brings his eyes back to the blond girl as he speaks, asking her silently to see the difference between him and the other one, the patched-up freak beside him. With whom he has nothing in common.

Following the girl’s gaze, Violet holds up her right hand and grabs at a loose end of tape dangling from her wrist. The tape comes off, a gauze pad with it, and she holds the hand up triumphantly. "See? I thought I would need stitches, but it’s already fine."

A pink scratch runs up the wrist to the palm, thin as a paper-cut. Connor exchanges a last glance with the blond girl, who holds her books protectively in front of her chest. "Violet. Just take it easy."

* * *

"Not good enough for you, is it?" says Holtz.

"Quiet." I’m watching him stop at the mailbox again. This time he thinks the letters must have come, it’s after the fifteenth. But there’s nothing in there but a Vons circular.

"You thought he would recognize something in her. You thought maybe he would even help her. When he chooses to deny his nature and play at being normal, you fret and sulk."

"Not sulking," I say. "Why should you care anyway? And who says he’s playing?"

"Come now. We both know there’s something not right about the boy."

For the first time it comes crystal-clear to me that the things Holtz says don’t match up. I guess I’ve always known it, but I was afraid of having to make judgments on my own again. I say, "I thought you said he would always be better than me. You said he was loved. Now you say he can’t be anyone but me. He’s not ‘normal.’ He’s full of my sin. So which is it?"

He shrugs. "Put it all together, son. Your real father had a certain grace and cunning, I’ll give him that, but I’m afraid he was always a bit… how do they say now?– slow on the uptake. You have that from him."

"You wanted me to destroy him," I say. "Now you want me to destroy my –well, me. Why is that?"

He tips an invisible hat. "A purely benevolent concern for the welfare of the citizens of this hamlet. And perhaps beyond."

Then I know. "You don’t think they can keep me here, do you? You think I’ll learn to get out."

Far away, Connor dumps his pack on the piano and comes into the kitchen. Time for a Pop-Tart to take the edge off his appetite. But they’re all there waiting for him: Mom at the counter, Dad in the breakfast nook, Mercy tipping dangerously in the rocking chair. There’s a pile of mail on the counter. The first thing he thinks is oh no someone pressed charges. They all have such serious, even solemn expressions on their faces. In that moment, looking from one to another, he can see they belong to the same family. Mercy has Dad’s straight black hair and long stern nose, and she also has Mom’s sly pinched eyes and little cleft chin. He doesn’t have anything of theirs.

But then Mercy cracks a smile, and Dad caves and starts grinning too. Mom keeps a straight face the longest. She slides the top envelope off the pile and hands it to him with a sidelong look of exaggerated disdain, as if she were a pissy meter maid giving him a ticket.

"Open it! Open it!" squeals Mercy.

He looks at the envelope, which for some reason he thinks should be fatter. "Looks like somebody already has."

I say, "You think I can’t change."

I can almost see Holtz’s wink, a flicker in the dark. Far away, I see Connor smoothing the letter on his knee and reading it. After the first few words he screws his face in a scowl, playing their game, and says, "Well, it’s only Harvard. My safety school."

"Yale next!" says Mercy. "No, Stanford!"

He makes an even longer face, though somewhere inside he’s grinning like a maniac. "I got rejected by Cal, didn’t I?"

I say again, "You think I can’t change."

"I say nothing," says Holtz. "Who put you here?"

He pauses for a long moment, and I actually think he’s done. Then he adds in what sounds like a single breath, "Who strapped explosives to you and your paramour? Who left a solid family man brain-dead on a roof? Who nearly decapitated the ex-Watcher? Who stood by as a young girl was butchered? Who felt more kinship with Angelus than Angel? Who called human sacrifice ‘cool’?"

"All right, so I suck," I say. I know I’m angry, but I seem to see my anger at a distance, somewhere in the blurry glare of white sunlight out the Beckfords’ kitchen window. I can’t hit anything anyway. "What am I gonna do about it?"

* * *

"Excellent question," says someone, not Holtz.

The light from the window is stronger, shining directly in my eyes. I turn and see Lilah Morgan standing in the doorway, her skin even deader-looking in daylight. She teeters slightly, catches herself on the doorframe and squints into the room, raising a hand to shade her eyes. "’scuse me. Didn’t mean to break in on such a Kodak moment."

I raise my hands to my chest, then to my face. They’re solid. I’m here. I even feel a gnawing in my stomach: hunger for something sweet and greasy.

Luckily Lilah’s occupying most of their attention. Dad has left his chair and gone to shake her cold hand. Mom is surreptitiously moving round to block the stack of dirty breakfast dishes on the counter from her view. Only Mercy glances at me and sees me hugging my arms to my chest, her eyes narrowing. Her gaze goes to the floor, and I see I’ve dropped one of the letters. I pick it up.

She’s telling them some lies about coming to congratulate Connor on his success. Having coffee with the guidance counselor, Yale admissions office called to say what a stellar student you have, blah blah blah. They’re lapping it up, not a bit bothered by the clammy cast to her skin.

"We’ve still got two or three of these suckers to open," says Dad jovially. He doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with sharing the moment with Lilah. "I told the kid there was no point wasting money on eight separate application fees."

Lilah ropes her long arm through mine. I have to make an effort not to pull away. I wonder why they don’t seem to find any of this strange.

"Do you know who I have out in the car, Connor? It’s a surprise. She wanted to see you right away when she heard your big news, so I offered to give her a lift up the hill."

"Tracy’s in the car?" says Mom, starting to look flushed and hectic like she always does when people drop in unexpectedly and she has to pretend to like it. "Tell her to come in! We’re going to open a bottle of w–uh, non-alcoholic sparkling cider and celebrate."

Lilah pastes a social smile on her red mouth and simpers, "I don’t think that’ll be any problem. Only she wanted to see Connor alone first. Would you mind too much if I stole the man of the hour? The girl says she’s got some kind of special surprise planned."

She tightens her alarmingly strong grip and steers me through the door, adding over her shoulder, "You know how these teen romances are. Everything’s a drama."

"Be back in just a sec, Mom," I say, although I know I won’t be. Mercy is still giving me that stink-eyed suspicious look when I twist around for a last glimpse. She’s got the letter in her hand–I must have dropped it again.

Once we’re out on the front walk, I push Lilah away so hard she stumbles. There’s one of those over-grown cars with the intimidating fenders and disappointing engines in the driveway. "Since when can ghosts drive?"

She shrugs. "There’s no time to watch you wobble down the hill on your own, sport, much as I could use the entertainment."

I reach for her windpipe–think again, reach for her shoulder and slam her against the shiny door of the car. Still solid. "I don’t want you talking to them ever again. What’s really going on?"

She smiles at me, but her breath (if that’s what it is) comes a little faster. "Ah, the impetuousness of youth. Fact is, I wouldn’t have wasted a moment chatting with the Cleavers if it hadn’t been the only way to get you out of there. I don’t find them as much fun as you do. But we have a situation developing."

"A situation?" I let her go and step round her to open the door myself. "You want me to kill some other lawyers for you? Or a demon?"

"No, dummy." She rubs her neck ruefully, then hops up and shoves me over into the passenger seat. "Though it’s a nice thought. When you left Violet like that you didn’t really think she’d just simmer down on her own, did you?"

* * *

I sit with my spine straight and my eyes on the road, ignoring the bumps. Lilah fiddles around trying to find a station on the radio. After going through singers and preachers and Middle East crises and one channel entirely devoted to the Church of Jasmine’s Transcendent Renewal (which makes me a little sad), she finally leans back and says, "Listen."

Lilah flicks it off. "Get the picture, kiddo?"

The newswoman’s voice sounded awfully excited, almost happy. I think in a way they like this kind of thing.

By now we’ve pulled up to the school, or as close as you can get to it, so I don’t know why she bothered with the radio. There are policemen milling around in little knots and bystanders arguing with them. There are two vans with TV logos on the side and what look like fifty-foot metal storks looming out of them, swivelling to survey the area with metal eyes. A helicopter burrs overhead.

I crack the door open, watching as a cop yells and gestures at us to move. "What do you expect me to do anyway?"

"Do?" says Lilah. "Don’t be silly. You’re going to do what you do best. Be the big hero. The star." She pats my shoulder, her cold fingertips grazing my neck. "Just go in there and neutralize her before the stupid girl gets nervous and kills somebody. Put it all to rest."

"Put it to rest?"

I have a second to wonder why the bloody hell Lilah, or her bosses, should care whether Violet kills no one or someone or everyone. Then the cop starts yelling again, and I slip out of the car, hit the pavement, knock him down and start running.

I take a long roundabout way between the houses, and they don’t bother to come after me. Or maybe I’ve lost them. It doesn’t matter; sooner or later I’ll have to deal with them. The cops have strung yellow tape between the tall guardlights that line the long curve of the school driveway. I walk on the other side of the street, moving as fast as I can without attracting attention, until I come up opposite the square brick bulge of the auditorium.

Connor hangs out with the drama crowd, so I know there’s a little entrance in the back that’s used as a stage door. It’s almost always locked. Sure enough, they’ve only posted one of the dark-vested soldiers there.

I cross the street, choose my moment–the cops are goggling at a just-arrived blond girl with a pearly grey-pink suit and a camera man–and duck under the tape. I run low to the grass. But no one shoots at me; they only yell, "Get back, kid! Freakin’ moron!"

I consider scaling the wall to the roof and getting in that way. But it would be too hard for him to explain afterward. So I bolt for the door.

The soldier blocks my way. The shield on his helmet is up, and his gun is still in its holster. "Get back behind the tape, you idiot. It’s locked."

I mutter, "My friend’s in there," and kick him in the windpipe. He goes straight down, no second wind. The door pops open with a little pull; it’s a cheap lock.

Inside is where they keep the sets for plays, dark and musty. I slam the door and pull something big–maybe a table–in front of it. That should hold for a little. I wish I knew the layout of this building well enough to go through the ventilation system. But Connor’s weirdly unobservant about such things. So I stick to the hallways.

It doesn’t take me long to find the door that leads to the tunnel to the locker-room, because there are about five especially well-armed soldiers with plastic shields and boxes of what looks like stereo equipment working in front of it.

I hope they haven’t heard about me over their earphones. I break my stride and walk out to them the way a normal, nervous kid would–rocking on the balls of my feet, brushing sweaty hair out of my eyes.

"Hey. I kinda fell asleep in the A/V closet, and when I woke up there were all these sirens."

One of the blast-shielded men breaks the circle to usher me away. "Get outside right now. We could be dealing with explosives."

"But you’re not," I say.

I can see where they’re focusing all their attention: on the glossy 9 x 11 leather briefcase lying innocently in the open doorway. It smells of cowhide and photocopier ink and plastic and metal– maybe one of those book-sized computers. But no powder, no gasoline, no propane, no nitrogen. I learned about these things when Jasmine thought we might have to blast our way into the sewers. She had an expert in our head.

I backhand my guide and leave him scuttling to get out from under his shield, like a bug on its back. Then I step across their invisible line.

They yell at me, and one of them dives for my legs. I kick him in the mouth and he doubles. I need to get there before they have time to aim, so I sidestep the briefcase and go straight for the barricade in the doorway.

It’s mostly heavy desks and metal folding chairs, with a few hurdles and volley-ball nets mixed in. Not hard to climb, and it doesn’t reach all the way to the ceiling. Not far into the tunnel either. Soon I’m in the sweaty concrete staircase on the other side.

I hear them yelping behind me: "What the hell was that? Did he use mace?"

But at the bottom of the stairs it’s quiet, which is a relief. I can smell people about twenty yards away. Dry sweat, fear. I press myself against the wall and make my way to the propped-open door. Maybe I should have nabbed a gun.

I can’t see anything but a wall of lockers. But I can hear someone gasping and snuffling in little jerks, almost sobbing. I stop.

* * *

The kid made noises like that. She’d been doing it all along in the food court, long before I grabbed them, but her dad turned it around and tried to blame it on me. "I think you broke my arm."

So what if I broke your fucking arm, I think now. Your kid’s already got a crappy life. I saw you slap her. She’s probably somewhere in L.A. sniffling right now while you drink and play cards with your buddies who think you’re some kind of celebrity because of what I did to you. What I did.

* * *

The chill that started on my shoulder blades is turning to heat now, all along my chest and arms, and it makes me care less what happens to this body. I take the space between the first two banks of lockers in three strides and come out in the dead center of the room.

There are seven of them, sitting in a ragged circle on either side of the bench with their legs crossed Indian-style and their hands behind their heads, their eyes down. Some of their lips are moving. Some of them have tight jaws, darting eyes, and others look subdued, as if they’re content to wait and see what happens next. One of them has a paper-white face and a bloody forearm wrapped in a sweatshirt, but he keeps his other arm crooked behind his head. Some I recognize, some I don’t.

"Oh fuckin’ A," says a hoarse, whispery voice.

I turn and look into Owen’s watery blue eyes. He looks dead-tired, as if there’s no energy for reaction left in him. He stands slumped against the back wall of lockers, his knees bent at an uncomfortable angle. Violet stands beside him with one arm crooked round his shoulders and the other pressing the long barrel of the gun to his ear. There’s blood and a fresh blackish swelling on his right cheek. He looks like a prizefighter.

"Fuckin’ A, look who’s come to save the day," he murmurs and starts to wheeze, or maybe laugh. "Our goose is cooked, bros."

"Shut up," says Violet in a small steady voice. And to me: "Put your hands like theirs are."

I do it, but slowly and with a smile.

Owen whispers, "What the fuck is he now? The hostage negotiator?"

Violet shakes her head and pulls him a little closer, so his hair brushes her shoulder. I recognize that gesture: it’s affectionate, but wrong. It’s how I held Cordy in the cab on the way there.

"No," she says to him. "He’s here to kill me."

The bench is between us, and she doesn’t seem to have loosened her grip on the gun. The last thing I want to do is talk.

But I say, "Let the others go."

"Leave just you and me, Connor? I don’t think so." She tips up the dry corners of her mouth. Her eyes look older, more hollow and goosefleshed around the edges than they did this afternoon. "Even with this, it might not be fair."

"She’s really strong," says one of the boys in a muffled, sheepish voice, trying to warn me.

I nod. I watch as Owen’s lids flutter. He looks almost like a sleepy child, resting against her breast.

"So you came here to kill him, right? Why don’t you just do it and get it over with?"

That makes his eyes fly open. One of the boys on the floor emits a dull groan.

Violet tips her head up as if she’s considering the question. She chews on her lip and readjusts her stance, getting her hip against the lockers for leverage. After what seems like a long time she says, "He apologized."

"That was nice of him," I say. I glance at Owen, who glares back at me. "But it doesn’t really help, does it? He still doesn’t love you."

I can feel his body tensing and tightening against her, holding itself back from lunging at me. "Fuck you, Beckford."

"I don’t care about you," I tell him. "I’m not your friend. I just don’t think you deserve this for not loving her. Something maybe, but not this." I shift my eyes to Violet. "Does he?"

"No," says Violet after a moment.

But she’s still thinking about it. I can see her eyes go inward, dark reflective pools, and her hand trembling just a fraction on the gun-barrel.

That’s all I need. I hop onto the bench and give Owen a sharp ball kick in the soft part of the stomach, just enough to tip him over to the side. He falls heavily, calling me a motherfucker, and Violet falls with him.

She doesn’t know how to use her strength yet. The second or two that she’s pinned under his weight is time enough for me to hit the concrete, bring my foot back and smack the gun out of her flapping hand.

It doesn’t go off. It skitters across the floor toward the tiled part with showers, and that’s when things get messy. The boys don’t need me to tell them to run: they’re already up in a scramble of bare elbows and knees, grazing the lockers as they go and jangling the locks. I turn to face Violet, who’s on her feet again and just catching sight of the gun.

This is the good part. She comes at me with harder-than-human fists, with kicks that aim just where they’re supposed to, and I twist and block and use the concrete wall to my right to launch a very neat flip-and-kick. I’m balanced like a dream. Solid surfaces give me just enough leverage, yet when I slam against them they seem to bounce back. So does she: I can feel the warmth of her skin when I block her. But I can feel the pain too: good solid whacks that keep me awake. I know just how many steps to take into a kick, and where to put my weak arm so I can take a punch to the face and spin on my heel and not fall. I feel like if I needed to, I could push off and fly.

It wasn’t like this the other time, the last. I didn’t want to fight him. I was going purely on reflexes, shaking with anger, and the only thing that got me through was knowing that I always got beat down in the end. That one had to look like a fight, was all.

But this feels so right that I almost lose sight of the objective, which is to get her well away from the gun and over behind the last row of lockers. Out of sight. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Owen pulling himself onto his hands and knees and making a mad scuttle for the tiles.

"Don’t!" I warn him. If he takes a shot at her he’s just as likely to hit me.

He goes for the gun anyway, and I clamp Violet in a headlock and yank her through the opening. She latches onto my wrist and pulls down hard and almost throws me, making misty rings of pain expand in my head. But I get her by the throat and jangle her up hard against the lockers.

She edges out enough room to kick and we’re going again–both of us running on instinct. Whatever she is, I don’t think she could stop if she wanted to. I think she’s just realizing that this is what she was built to do, and that only makes what I have to do seem worse.

But I don’t have forever.

"Fuckin’ A," someone groans behind the row of lockers.

I jerk my head up, looking around for Owen and the shiny black gun-barrel. Then my eyes slip to the side and I see that Violet’s looking too.

She’s on her back probably before she realizes it. She was off-balance already. It takes a while to learn to save your strength for the end.

She grunts and tries to shove my knee off her chest, but there isn’t anything to give her leverage. Her arms are sprawled wide on the concrete, her hands opening and closing as if she’s looking for something. I pin one of them down and get my other hand on her throat.

I don’t know if I can do it with just one. Her throat feels warm and doughy and lumpy, just like any human being’s, and there’s a pulse jumping under my middle finger. I don’t squeeze, but her mouth gapes and closes as if she’s trying to get a good breath. Her eyes were wide at first, startled and angry. Now they look the way they did when I asked her what she thought Owen deserved.

She takes another breath and looks up at me. I can see from her look that whatever brought her here didn’t start with Owen. It’s a long story I don’t want to hear.

"I turned out more like a supervillain, huh?"

I shrug and let her hand go. It lies curled and still. "You fought really well. Almost kicked the shit out of me."

She smiles a little bit. "Go ahead. Do it. Before they come."

I shake my head. But at the same time I know I will.

I put my free hand around her throat too and feel for the right hold, looking for the touchy hinges that keep the spinal column in place. I don’t want to make a mess of it or cause her any pain. Her pulse is more sedate now, her breath coming in soft long puffs against my face. Her eyes are focused on something beyond me, but for an instant they meet mine.

That glance is so hopeful that it startles me. "Just a second," I say. "Just wait a second, it’ll all be OK."

All at once there’s a thunder of heavy boots on the stairs. I tense and fumble one more time, thinking I’ve found my grip at last. I think she knows it too; she braces herself and closes her flat grey eyes. A voice in the stairwell shouts a command.

"Really bright," says a raspy, wounded voice above me.

I think at first it’s Holtz, but then I see it’s Owen. He raises one hand, his eyes glazed and bloodshot, and shakes his finger at me. "Really fucking bright, Beckford. Murderers don’t go to Yale."

I let go. Violet makes a strangled, angry sound.

They’re on me before I know it, pulling us apart and crushing her flat on her stomach with her arms pinned behind her back. They’re efficient about it, and there are enough of them. She makes a thin moaning noise. I hate it.

They’ve let me go, and I stand with my fists clenched at my sides. Violet mewls like a baby. One of the soldiers comes up and throws a blanket over my shoulders.

He sees the look in my eyes but tries to pretend he doesn’t. "It’s OK, son. It’s over. Everything’s gonna be all right."

* * *

All through the blankets, the cups of hot tea, the hugs, the crying, the suspicious questions, the cameras, all I’m thinking about is being hungry. I never did eat dinner, and in the end they’re so flustered and distressed and relieved that they forget to feed me. Mom puts me to bed in my room as if I were eight years old, with a glass of warm milk and a red bullet-shaped pill on the side-table "just in case."

"Just in case you wake up and can’t get back to sleep." She looks apologetic; I know she doesn’t believe in most pills.

"’S OK, Mom. I’m gonna have a really good rest."

She pats my hair and actually sits down at my desk for a while, waiting. I make my breath go slow and even, and in the end she leaves.

It takes them a while longer to go to bed. First there’s droning from the TV and on-and-off squealing from the phone, then just mumbling in low voices. I think they’ve taken the phone off the hook.

When everything’s been dead still for about an hour–it’s nearly two AM–I pull back the blankets and get up. I steal downstairs, soundless on the thick runner, cross into the kitchen and flick on the light over the stove.

Lilah’s waiting for me there, of course. I don’t know if she crowbarred her way in or just appeared out of thin air. She’s propped against the fridge with her ankles crossed. Her shoes are dark-blood-colored this time.

"Out of the way."

She steps to the side, a slightly startled look on her face. But I don’t care one way or the other. I know where I’m heading. There was roast chicken with some kind of tangy sweet sauce last night, and I can smell it through the door.

Sure enough, there’s about half a cooked carcass left in the foil-wrapped pan. Over-cooked in my opinion, but it still makes my stomach rumble and my taste-buds prickle. I carry the whole thing over to the table, extra-careful not to drop it, and grab a drumstick by the knuckly end.

Lilah watches me, and I can almost smell her disgust. "Would you like some mead to wash down that roast beast, Lancelot?"

I nod, then realize she doesn’t mean it. "Don’t you miss it? Eating?"

She collapses her long self into the chair opposite and shrugs. "Sometimes. Not the whole starving and purging bit, but then I kind of had that licked anyway. Shape-holding spell. Seriously, don’t you think you should at least use a napkin?"

"What for?"

She tosses her hair back, showing me the deep thread-fine scar. "You’re awfully chipper for somebody who’s just released a preternaturally strong psychotic-break-prone bundle of teenage angst back into the populace."

"I don’t know what those words mean," I say, though actually I do know most of them. "She’s not back in the populace anyway. They’re going to lock her up somewhere safe."

"Safe, Connor? You should know how much that means when we’re dealing with a special girl like our little friend Amanda. Remember Faith?"

I shrug and pull apart a wing. "What’s she got to do with this? Anyway, Faith stayed in jail."

Lilah drops her voice an octave. "Until she wanted to leave."

I snag a dangling bit of skin and shove it in my mouth. Tangy. I’ve had ‘roast beast,’ and it’s nothing like as good as this. I look up and see that Lilah’s eyes are crinkling again. Dying for a taste, I’ll bet.

I pull off another piece of skin, slowly. "But Faith is the Slayer. Violet had a lot of fight in her, yeah, but I don’t really think you can compare. What is she, anyway? Why’d you want me to kill her?"

She only purses her lips. I know it’s mad to try to outsmart her. If Holtz were here he would tell me so.

After a moment she says, "You were awfully sorry to let her go alive, weren’t you, sweetheart? Those killing instincts were kicking in."

I shake my head. "Violet’s not a demon."

"That never bothered you before." Lilah sees the look on my face and switches gears, tipping her head to the side to look thoughtful. "No, it wasn’t that, was it? I’ve seen you in a killing rage. Not this time. You were sorry for her. It eats you up inside to know she has to live in prison when you could have given her peace. And you should have. It’s exactly what we wanted you to do."

I look down at the debris in the pan, wondering whether to start on something else. I’d like to say that that’s exactly why I didn’t snap Violet’s neck. Because I knew it was their idea. Because it was evil.

Instead I say, "They would have put me–him– in jail."

Lilah uncrosses her legs under the table, and I can feel her starting to get annoyed. "You could have made it look like an accident. Anyway, what do you care whether he ends up in jail or Stanford, dead boy? College is just another kind of prison, you know. It’ll take him away from the Cleavers. He’ll discover the joys of keggers and you’ll spend your weekends watching him vomit in public."

I say, "Maybe I’ll enjoy these keggers too, whatever they are."

"Not from where you’ll be, you won’t."

"Where’s that?"

I raise my eyes and look straight at her, letting her know that now I understand. Holtz knew all along. Whatever kind of magic they did, it doesn’t give them the power to keep me in or out of my body. Only I can give that to them.

She curls her brown-red lip at me. "It’s not that simple, you know. The choice had to be built in, yes, but you won’t use it. You’ll be afraid to. And you should be. Already you’ve disrupted his life. Tracy’s afraid of him, and Owen won’t stop spreading rumors. When the dust settles, people may not be calling him a hero. All kinds of awkward questions are already getting asked."

I know. I had to answer them. I look at the smeary dish, trying to decide whether there’s anything else I can eat so as to put it off a little longer. But my stomach’s full. "His life, my life," I say, and get up from the table. "You want to make it sound like they’re different."

"Where are you going?" she asks as I switch off the light. It’s almost pitch-dark, and I don’t know whether she’s still standing beside me or is just a disembodied voice in my ear. What magic did they use to make her?

"First I’m going up to bed. Then I’m going back where I belong."

I feel my way toward the stairs, knowing I don’t have to worry about being snatched away before I’m ready.

She follows, though I don’t hear the footsteps, and hisses gently in my ear, "He’ll never be you, Connor. You’ll always be the rough draft. If he had to live a day of your life, even in his dreams, it would make him slit his own throat."

* * *

Maybe she’s wrong. Maybe he isn’t that soft. Maybe there is a way for me to be him, to be us both. But I know she probably isn’t wrong, so I stay here.

I miss a lot of things. Eating and smelling and hearing and feeling and seeing in that close-up vivid jumpy way living people do. Sometimes I feel them tugging at me, trying to coax me down into him, but I don’t go. I figure that if I have a choice, even if it is just a loophole in a piece of black magic, I should use it.

Sometimes I remember what it was like to be swept along on the tidal wave of Jasmine’s love, not caring who I killed as long as it was for Her. I miss that too. When I had my hands on Violet’s throat, I knew I was doing right. I knew. The girl was past saving, past pretending things are OK. It’s the kind of thing Angel and the others never understood. Sometimes there is no tomorrow, no second wind. But I lost my nerve at the last instant, and I made Violet limp on.

"Do you think an act of mercy will save you? Do you think it even was mercy?" Holtz mutters. He’s quieter these days, and sometimes he holds his peace altogether.

I don’t answer. I’m watching him–me–stroll down the touristy main drag of Los Olivos. All the restaurants have flowers in boxes out front and tables with colored umbrellas. Mercy is walking ten paces ahead, trying to pretend she doesn’t know Connor because apparently it’s shameful to have your brother chauffeur you to town.

A stiff cool breeze is blowing in from the coast. Two girls from school pass him–one of them the blonde from the choir room–and they stop and gingerly say hello. Gingerly, tentatively, nervously: I don’t know what to call it. There are stories going around about him now.

After they’ve moved on, Mercy turns and comes loping back to where he stands gazing at a display of mountain biking gear. She’s holding a glossy pamphlet that she must have picked off one of the kiosks. "Hey, Connor! Listen, I’m going to say a spell. Blue lupines, golden poppies, chocolate lilies, scarlet Indian paintbrushes. Are you getting sleepy?"

He rolls his eyes, which immediately get distracted by a pretty girl in jeans and a strappy black tank top. Tourist– he hasn’t seen her around here. "That’s a list of flowers that grow in the mountains, Mercy. Sometimes you’re quite strange."

"It would make an awesome spell though, wouldn’t it? If I were Wicca I would try to work it into a spell."

She pauses, reading through the list again, then follows his eyes to the pretty girl.

It’s hard not to; she’s heading straight for them. She has an easy, swingy, almost boyish stride, and her loose dark hair flares behind her. Mercy says, "I think I’m gonna write a song and use this as lyrics. When the blue lupines are in the seventh house,/ And the golden poppies touch the stars…"

"Shut yer face, Mercy." He has an impulse to grab her, lift her bodily and put her behind him. The girl is almost abreast of them now, and her eyes are–yeah, they really are on him. Stuck on him. He smiles.

The girl smiles back. She has a chipped front tooth and sarcastic black brows. "You’re the kid, aren’t you? The Wonder Boy?"

He drops his gaze. He feels rather than sees Mercy scoot away, back on her own private shopping trip, and he’s grateful for that. She may be a brat, but she knows how comments like that from strangers embarrass him. He needs to deal with them on his own.

He looks back and sees the girl sizing him up. She’s doing it not in surreptitious little glances the way people usually do, but brazenly, without the least pretense of doing otherwise. She frowns with her brows and asks, "Are you sure you’re a boy? I mean, I know you think you got the Y chromosome, but there’s that whole deal where your genes get screwed up and don’t like, match the equipment, and your parents raise you wearing the wrong clothes. And you’re awful pretty."

He just glares, feeling his knees go springy and his fist close, even though fighting this girl is the last thing he would do. He’s through fighting girls.

She winks at his glare and makes a scrunchy little be that way face. "No offense, ‘kay kid? I just heard you’re wicked strong, so I wondered if you were a girl maybe. It would make more sense."

"Not a girl." He starts to turn on his heel, then stops. "That’s one I haven’t heard before."

"Yeah? So what do they call you mainly? Clark Kent? Robin? The One? Demon-spawn?"

He shakes his head. "Usually I just get ‘psycho headcase.’"

The girl makes a single move–smoothing her hair back behind her ear–but in that innocent little gesture he sees a conscious physical threat. If she wanted, she seems to be saying, she could use that same hand to slam him up against the display window and leave him surrounded by a spiderweb of cracked glass. "You are Conrad Beckford, right? Like, you’re the kid everybody thinks is as mental as that chick he almost snuffed in the locker room?"

"Connor," he says, feeling his mouth get dry. He lowers his head, ready to walk away again. "You weren’t there. You don’t understand."

"Yeah well, try me." She sticks out her hand, and he almost has to take it. Her grip starts soft and ends bruising. "Nice to meet ya, Connor. Now, who told you to whack Amanda?"

He just stares at her. She looks like she’d rather be moving on from the talking to the hitting, and that he sort of gets. He’s been feeling like that a lot lately.

She cocks her head to one side and says, "A coupla kids from your school got cut up last week in the cemetery over by Santa Ynez. Bled to death before anybody found ‘em. Hear about that?"

Of course he has. People are talking about an L.A. gang migrating into the valley, one that leaves ritual marks on the victims’ necks. One local radio preacher says that it’s a sign of the End Times; that it’s linked to that town that collapsed into a pile of dust in a crater. In a furtive way he’s relieved that it all takes people’s minds off him.

He says, "Violet–Amanda–was gonna whack half the varsity lacrosse team. I just stopped her. I don’t see what it’s got to do with Brad and Emily being murdered."

"Yeah, well maybe you don’t."

He can tell she’s at that point, but it’s still too fast for him. One minute they’re standing on the street talking like two normal teenagers and he’s still trying not to glance from her face to her chest too often, and the next minute he’s in the alley between two stores with his back against the cement and she’s twisting his collar, yanking him almost off the ground. Her white face is even whiter, and her lower lip is curled. Her mouth is painted almost the same color as Lilah’s, he notes disconnectedly.

She prods his chest with her elbow, getting a tighter hold even though he isn’t resisting. "If Amanda’d been around and not rotting in jail, she might’ve saved Brad and Emily. Or all the Brads and Emilys there are gonna be if someone doesn’t step up to the plate. Don’t lie to me, wonder boy. Your friend told me how you fight. He also told me he heard you ask that Amanda chick whether she was the slayer."

He can tell she wants him to push back, to try his strength. She’s even started to loosen her hold a little, to let him think he has an opening. But he stays still. He feels calmer than he has for a while, almost at peace. Finally a few things are matching up in his head, even if he isn’t sure he wants to see the final pattern.

He says a little breathlessly, "I didn’t almost kill her ‘cause I thought she was the Slayer."

"Yeah?" She lets him go all at once and watches him stumble for his footing, her forehead furrowing. "You weren’t trying to take out a Slayer?"

"I couldn’t have."

He stands up straight, almost eye to eye with her, and smiles. He knows it’s not the smile his mother likes. It’s the smile he uses to scare Mercy with a flashlight tucked under his chin. Somehow it just seems right.

Then he says, "Because I knew that couldn’t happen as long as you were around. And I knew nobody would take you out anytime soon. Because you're Faith. And I've been waiting for somebody like you."